Diablo 3 lead designer: PvP not 'awesome' enough yet

Diablo 3's PvP mode still looks to be a long way from release and the game's lead designer addresses the reasons behind the delay.

Though Blizzard has released Diablo 3 on consoles and is inching closer to completing the Reaper of Souls expansion, the long-delayed PvP mode still appears to be a long way off. Nearly a year after Blizzard declared that the game mode was not meeting expectations, lead designer Kevin Martens has offered an update of sorts as to why PvP has yet to see the light of day.

"The reason why it's difficult to do PvP, is that we made a vast PvE game," Martens tells AusGamers. "The core fantasy for us was 'I want to kill lots of monsters in lots of awesome ways.' You can't kill lots of players in those awesome ways, or lots of players will get ticked off because they have the exact same fantasy as you, and they want to kill you in vast ways, so essentially, the game is automatically changing."

Martens adds that each character varies in terms of power and gear and that the Diablo team hasn't had the experience of balancing players against other players. Because overpowered characters often lead to quick deaths, the team determined that the PvP mode as it was structured was simply not fun.

Martens also rules out the idea of selecting pre-made characters. "People say 'well, why not make pre-made characters? Give me two different Barbs I can chose from, and that's my PvP Barb,' but that's not your PvP Barb, that's some random one. If your gear doesn't matter, and this game is about killing monsters and getting loot, what we're actually making is a different game."

That's not to say that Blizzard has given up on the idea of PvP entirely. Martens says that the team is still working on a PvP mode that utilizes player-built heroes.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what is video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?